Sherwin Bitsui

Sherwin Bitsui (born 1974 in Fort Defiance, Arizona) is originally from Baaʼoogeedí (White Cone, Arizona), on the Navajo Nation. His book, Floodsong, won the American Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award.

He is Navajo of the Todichʼíiʼnii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tłʼízíłání (Many Goats Clan).

He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. He is the recipient of the 2000-01 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the 1999 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, a Soul Mountain Residency, a Lannan Foundation Literary Residency Fellowship and a 2006 Whiting Award. In 2012, he was honored with an NACF Artist Fellowship in Literature. He has served in visiting faculty positions, including distinguished visiting, Eminent Writer for the University of Wyoming, Visiting Hugo Writer University of Montana, and San Diego State University, where he has been on creative writing faculty since 2013. Also, since 2013, he has served on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts in the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program.

Sherwin has published poems in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), Lit Magazine, and elsewhere. His poems were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas.

Many of Bitsui's poems explore how different values, concepts and ideas become when experienced in Navaho as opposed to English.

His book of poetry, Flood Song, was published in 2009 by Copper Canyon Press and won an American Book Award in 2010. His most recent book of poetry, Dissolve, was published in 2018 also by Copper Canyon Press.

Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Poetry

• Dissolve, Copper Canyon Press. 2018. ISBN 978-1-55659-5455
• Flood Song. Copper Canyon Press. 2009. ISBN 978-1-55659-308-6.
• Shapeshift. University of Arizona Press. 2003. ISBN 978-0-8165-2342-9.